Tag Archive for: farming

Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From | Louise Gray

In Avocado Anxiety, Louise Gray takes us on a deeply personal journey from the accusative supermarket aisles – ‘proper mothers cook for their children’ – back to her family roots in a vibrant Edinburgh greengrocers. At a time when we have become so thoroughly divorced from the food that sustains us and its impact on the planet, Gray digs the dirt on organic potatoes, greenhouse tomatoes and the surprising delights of UK-grown fava beans. Each chapter answers a question about a familiar item in our shopping basket. Is plant protein as good as meat? Is foraged food more nutritious? Could bees be the answer to using fewer chemicals?

‘When I write about fruit and vegetables,’ Gray tells us, ‘I am really writing about an effort to be a better person, to leave a lighter footprint on the world.’ This colour-filled and engaging book is a must for everyone who loves food, and loves the planet. – Sandy Winterbottom

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Meat Lovers | Rebecca Hawkes

Tender and brutal, seductive and repulsive, Meat Lovers introduces a compelling new mode of hardcore pastoral.

I am trying to go vegetarian but finding myself weak,
week to week browsing the meat aisle at a linger
close enough to chill my arms to gooseflesh. I only buy
stuff so processed it hardly makes sense to call it meat.
Saveloy, nugget, continental frankfurter;
whatever gets extruded pink beyond possible memory
of the preceding body.
— ‘The Flexitarian’

In this dazzling first collection, acclaimed Wellington poet and Canterbury farm-girl Rebecca Hawkes takes a generous bite from the excesses of earthly flesh – first ‘Meat’, then ‘Lovers’.

‘Meat’ is a coming of age in which pony clubs, orphaned lambs and dairy-shed delirium are infused with playful menace and queer longings. Between bottle-fed care and killing-shed floors, the farm is a heady setting for love and death.

In ‘Lovers’, the poet casts a wry eye over romance, from youthful sapphic infatuation to seething beastliness. Sentimental intensity is anchored by an introspective comic streak, in which ‘the stars are watching us / and boy howdy are they judgemental’.

This collection of queasy hungers offers a feast of explosive mince & cheese pies, accusatory crackling, lab-grown meat and beetroot tempeh burger patties, all washed down with bloody milk or apple-mush moonshine. It teems with sensuous life, from domesticated beasts to the undulating mysteries of eels, as Hawkes explores uneasy relationships with our animals and with each other.

Source: Auckland University Press